Inspired by The Exorcist‘s defiling of a childhood bedroom, director David Gordon Green trashes a beloved property in this heretical sequel.

50 years after the events of William Friedkin’s Catholic classic, two girls (Lidya Jewett and Olivia O’Neill) wander into the woods and emerge three days later with evil spirits in place of their personalities. Unfortunately neither Character had a personality to begin with, so it takes their families an agonising amount of screen time to realise their daughters are possessed and not merely acting out because they couldn’t get Taylor Swift tickets.

Green sets out to do to The Exorcist what he previously did to Halloween, and sadly succeeds. Another Blumhouse-produced “soft reboot”, The Exorcist: Believer is a sequel to the original, erasing the intervening instalments like so many brain cells. Having done the same to Jamie Lee Curtis, Green brings back and then hospitalises a character from the original (Ellen Burstyn). And he once again has his characters pontificate unprompted on the nature of evil, in a futile attempt to make it seem like the film is about something.

Hundreds of Exorcist ripoffs have managed to replicate its storyline, if not its cinematic quality, but Green fails to identify its most basic elements. There isn’t even an exorcist, or rather there is (E. J. Bonilla) but he isn’t allowed to perform the exorcism, so he’s essentially redundant unless the children require a funeral or decide to get married. Instead the hospital lets the parents take the kids, tie them to chairs in the garage, and perform their own interdenominational exorcism.

The outcome is as confused as it sounds, muddying what should have been a simple girl-meets-demon story with Green’s usual mixture of incoherent moralising and offensive stereotypes (black people practising Hoodoo). He doubles down on his “community” obsession that made no sense in Halloween, and looks laughable next door to The Exorcist whose characters added so much local flavour. Here we get a nurse/nun/neighbour for the price of one Ann Dowd, and a dad (Leslie Odom Jr.) who appears pathologically unmoved by his daughter’s deterioration.

The Exorcist 6 (or The Exorcist II 2) is another boring regurgitation that sees Green take a straightforward idea and believe he is somehow better than it. Watch out Jason, Friday the 13th is probably next.